- The design program suggested doesn ’ t only pay attention to what is right in front of its nose, but works with strategic appreciation for incorporation and recursion between scales, which range from the geo-graphic staging of planetarity to the molecular granularity of deep address, and in between. This too is a logic of Stacks. As for governance, what binds it to software is its dual situation “ before the law. ” It both precedes the law and is subject to the law. It is both how the state organizes the legal possibilities of connection through the ordination of worldly interfaces and how our legal entanglement with the interfaciality of planetary computation allows it in turn to take on the roles of governance. Perhaps it is true that the killer application of the Internet of Things was “ insurance. ” At first blush, this sounds both boring and scary, but I think there is a lot to this (though not in ways that O ’ Reilly is necessarily speaking to). Some critics jumped on this remark as proof that Californians are digital fascists after all. I think, however, that after bitcoin and digital money, another area to redesign may in fact be the pooled and priced risk as a future model of governmentality, as understood in the disciplinary Foucauldian sense and meant thereby as a good thing. After Mauss (and Graeber), we believe that money represents “ gift ” and “ debt ” but it also represents risk, and this may be equally important. I floated the notion above that Google-scale platforms might be able to solve both the “ socialist pricing problem ” as well the “ capitalist pricing problem, ” namely, transaction externalities (e.g., carbon footprint, infrastructure theft, energy theft, pollution), by including these real costs in to the real price. That price might not only be price of an individual transaction but the price of the insurance and reinsurance that allows the enterprise to function in the first place. That is, insurance as killer app of Internet of Things gets interesting if those “ things ” are not just smart refrigerators but every little bit of every supply chain that must account for itself as a carbon-intensive Earth object.
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